The shore was so narrow that Doyle had to put his back to the wall and edge along, for his shoulders were too broad. I actually fit better on the narrow path than the men, but even I had to press my na**d back to the smooth cave wall. The stones weren't cold as they would have been in an ordinary cave, but strangely warm. The lip of shore we inched across was meant for smaller things to travel, or perhaps not meant to be walked at all. The skeletons littering the shore were those of things that would have swum, or crawled, but nothing that walked upright. The bones looked like the jumbled-together remains of fish, snakes, and things that normally didn't have skeletons in the oceans of mortal earth. Things that looked like squid, except that squid did not have internal skeletons.
We were halfway around that narrow, bone-studded shore when the air wavered on its far side next to the door. For a moment the air swam, and then Sholto, King of the Sluagh, Lord of That Which Passes Between, was standing there.
Chapter 10
SHOLTO WAS TALL, MUSCLED, HANDSOME, AND LOOKED EVERY bit a highborn sidhe of the Seelie Court. His long hair was even a pale yellow, like winter sunshine with an edge of snow to it. His arm was in a sling, and as he turned his head to the light, a faint darkness - like a stain of bruises - touched his face. Kitto had said Sholto's own court had attacked him. They were afraid that bedding me would make Sholto completely sidhe and no longer sluagh enough to be their king.
Four robed figures stood behind him. They fanned out, some toward the golden door, some toward us. Doyle said, "King Sholto, we are not here of our own choice. We ask forgiveness for entering your kingdom uninvited."
I would have dropped to my knees, if there had been room, but the crumbling edge of black earth was only inches from my feet, and my back was plastered against the stone wall. There was no room for niceties on this path. There was also precious little room for the guards to fight - if they attacked us now, we were going to lose.
A blade glimmered from the edge of one of the shorter cloaked guards as he spoke. "You are nude and nearly weaponless: Only something desperate would bring you here like this, with the princess in tow."
"It is the beginning of their invasion," came a female voice from one of the tallest guards. I knew that voice. It was Black Agnes, Sholto's chief bodyguard, and chief among his lovers at this court. She had tried to kill me once before for jealousy's sake.
Sholto turned enough to look at her. The movement revealed that wide, pale bandages were all he was wearing on his upper body. Whatever they covered must have been a terrible wound.
"Enough, Agnes, enough!" Sholto silenced her, rumbling echoes around the cavern.
The black-robed figure of Agnes that loomed over him glanced at me. I had a moment to see the gleam of her eyes in the dark ugliness of her face. The night-hags were ugly; it was part of what they were.
One of the shorter, robed guards leaned into Sholto, as if whispering, but the echoes that hissed along the cave walls were not human speech. The high-pitched tittering of a nightflyer was coming from the human-size figure - though it couldn't be a nightflyer, for it walked upright.
Sholto turned back to us. "Are you saying that your queen sent you here?"
"No," Doyle said.
"Princess Meredith," Sholto called, "we are within our rights to slay your guards and keep you here until your aunt ransoms you back. Darkness knows this, as does the Killing Frost. On the other hand, Mistral might have let his temper lead him astray, and Abeloec can turn up anywhere when he's lost in drink, can't he, Segna?"
The figure in the pale yellow cloak spoke in a rough voice. "Aye, he were unhappy when he sobered up, weren't you, cup bearer?" I'd heard Abe called that before as a term of derision, but I'd never understood until tonight. It was a reminder of what he had once been; a way of rubbing his face in what he had lost.
"You taught me to be more cautious about where I passed out, ladies," Abe said, and his voice was his usual casual, amused, bitter tone.
The two hags laughed. The other guards joined in a chorus of hissing laughter, which let me know that whatever the two shorter guards were, they were the same kind of creature.
Sholto spoke. "Don't worry, Darkness, the hags didn't help Abe break his vow of celibacy, for that is a death sentence to all. The tearing of white sidhe flesh amuses them almost as much as sex."
The high twittering voice came faintly again. Sholto nodded at what it had said. "Ivar makes a good point. You are all wet and muddy, and that did not happen here in our garden." He motioned with his good hand at the caked, drying earth and the water trapped feet below us, clearly inaccessible.
"I would ask permission to bring the princess off this ledge," Doyle said.
"No," Sholto said, "she is safe enough there. Answer the question, Darkness...or Princess...or whoever. How did you get wet and muddy? I know that it is snowing aboveground; do not use that to lie."
"The sidhe never lie," Mistral said.
Sholto and his guards all laughed. The high tittering mixed with the rumbling bass/alto of the hags and Sholto's open, joyous laughter. "The sidhe never lie: Spare us that, the biggest lie of all," said Sholto.
"We are not allowed to lie," Doyle said.
"No, but the sidhe version of the truth is so full of holes that it is worse than a lie. We, the sluagh, would prefer a good honest lie to the half-truths that the court we are supposed to belong to feeds us. We starve on a diet of near lies. So tell us true, if you can, how came you wet and muddy, and here?"
"It rained in the dead gardens, in our sithen," Doyle said.